Rian Johnson: "I came up with a very elaborate, and I think pretty solid, theory about how all of the paradoxes and everything works. And then it’s a matter of figuring out how much of that you cannot explain." Source: Cinema Blend

Rian Johnson: "[It's about] figuring how to keep it simple. With this film especially, because even though it’s a time-travel movie, the pleasure of it doesn’t come from the mass of time travel. It’s not a film like Primer (a 2004 cult movie that deals in the complexities of time travel), for instance, where the big part of the enjoyment is kind of working out all the intricacies of it. For Looper, I very much wanted it to be a more character-based movie that is more about how these characters dealt with the situation time travel has brought about. So the biggest challenge was figuring out how to not spend the whole movie explaining the rules and figure out how to put it out there in a way that made sense on some intuitive level for the audience; then get past it and deal with the real meat of the story." Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in response to being asked about pre-destiny and the "butterfly effect": "Well, that is one of the age-old questions, the whole 'free will' question. Is our fate already written for us, or is it unwritten? Are we deciding, in any given moment, which way we go? And I don’t have an answer. My personal opinion is that there isn’t one answer, that, in fact, both things are true." Source: Cinema Blend

Rian Johnson: "The best thing you can do is create an internal logic that you stick to and play fair by, and then make sure that your storytelling is tight. That’s what Back to the Future does great, for example. You can look at the thing with the limbs disappearing in Back to the Future in the Polaroid and say, “Well, does that really make sense?” And the answer is it doesn’t matter, because intuitively it make[s] sense to the audience. It makes sense on a storytelling level. You see that and you realize instantly what’s happened. … So once I give myself permission to do that, then that kind of took that weight off my shoulders a little bit. Look, it’s a beast. It’s a tough thing to work into your story and tame it, especially a movie like this where it’s not about time travel, it’s about the characters dealing with the effects of it. It’s just something you have to continually stop yourself from explaining every little thing." Source: Film School Rejects

Rian Johnson, when asked the age-old theoretical question of if he could travel back in time, would he kill someone like Hitler: “For me, that’s essentially the wrong question. Which is weird, because you could say that, in some way, it’s the question that Looper eventually puts its chips down on. But for me, the real question isn’t ‘Would you kill Hitler?’ It’s ‘Does solving a problem by finding the right person and killing them ever work? Or does it create a self-perpetuating loop of violence?’ And that to me is not a theoretical, time-travel question. That’s a real-world question.” Source: The New York Times

Emily Blunt: "Oh, I don't intend to -- I mean it's a question that everyone asks on this movie, but I don't like to dwell on the past. And it may be that I feel like I'm in a happy place right now, so I wouldn't want to change anything because I think everything leads you to a certain place. You know, I believe in that, that things are fatalistic, and you end up where you're supposed to end up through the choices you make. So I don't know if I'd change anything. Maybe I'd feel differently if I was sad or depressed right now -- I'd blame it on some past mistake..." Source: Buzzine

Rian Johnson: "I took a design cue from the gadget at the original Trinity site, where the first atomic bomb had been set off. I wanted it to look like it felt dangerous, but also crude and mysterious. There’s no indication on the outside of the device as to how it worked. Because that was these characters’ perspective on it. None of the characters in the movie know how it works. They just have to deal with the consequences of this monolithic thing. It’s like the monolith in 2001. It’s basically an alien technology to them, and they just have to deal with what it is presenting them." Source: Cinema Blend

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